ghèto

In 1516, the Republic of Venice decreed that all Jews must live on a small island in Cannaregio that housed an old foundry — a getto (from gettare, to cast metal) or ghèto in Venetian dialect. Gates were locked at night. Guards patrolled the bridges. This was the first official ghetto.

The word spread as the practice spread. Pope Paul IV established Rome's ghetto in 1555. Frankfurt, Prague, and other European cities followed. The word traveled from Venetian metalworking to become the universal term for forced segregation.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis revived the medieval ghetto with industrial precision: the Warsaw Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, and hundreds more became staging grounds for extermination. The word absorbed this horror and has carried it since.

In the 20th century, 'ghetto' crossed the Atlantic to describe racially segregated neighborhoods in American cities — Harlem, South Side Chicago, Watts. The word shed its specifically Jewish history and became broadly associated with urban poverty and racial exclusion.